Meša Selimović

Born in Tuzla in 1910, Selimović studied literature in Belgrade and joined the Communist Partisans to fight the Nazi occupation during the Second World War. His brother, arrested by the new Communist authorities themselves on embezzlement charges, was executed shortly after the war despite Selimović's pleading for clemency, a personal wound that became the germ of Death and the Dervish's story of a brother's unjust arrest.

He spent decades as a professor and cultural official before that novel, an Ottoman-era parable of a Sufi sheikh drawn into the machinery of political power, established him in 1966 as Bosnia's foremost postwar novelist.

Late in life he moved to Belgrade and controversially declared himself ethnically Serb rather than Bosnian, a statement that has complicated his legacy across the successor states of Yugoslavia ever since. He died in Belgrade in 1982.